ABC's AOL Pact Marks Web's Growing TV Allure — Walt Disney Co.'s ABC became the latest major network to strike a deal with AOL allowing its full-length prime-time shows to be available free on the Time Warner Inc.-owned portal. — ABC shows will be available on AOL starting today …

Is Hulu Doomed? NBC To Begin Offering Free Downloads — NBC will start offering its top television shows as ad-supported downloads this fall (autumn) from the NBC Direct website. — The announcement is a major setback for the NBC/ News Corp joint venture Hulu, which was originally set up to offer this very content.

Google Shared Stuff — Google's social side is more visible every day. A new service called "Shared Stuff" lets you share interesting links with your friends and the entire world. You need to drag a bookmarklet to your browser's link bar or to click on the "Share" button from a web page …

Google Shared Stuff — Google has just quietly launched a new social link sharing service called Google Shared Stuff. — According to this help file, you can add links to your "shared stuff page" by adding a bookmarklet to your web browser's "Links" or "Bookmarks" bar or by clicking this button …

Americans giving up friends, sex for Web life — NEW YORK (Reuters) - Surfing the net has become an obsession for many Americans with the majority of U.S. adults feeling they cannot go for a week without going online and one in three giving up friends and sex for the Web.

Ignoring open source is costing us dear — Firefox, the browser that dared to challenge the supremacy of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, has just reached 400m downloads - and deservedly so. It now claims a market share of nearly 20% in the UK and 30% in Germany.

MediaDefender Anti-Piracy Tools Leaked — Similar to the previously released e-mails, tracking database and phone call this leak is also spread by the group that goes by the name "MediaDefender-Defenders". In the .nfo that was posted with the torrent we read:

Time for Apple to face the music? — Columnist Bill Thompson asks whether the time has come for Apple to be put under the EU microscope in the same way as Microsoft has. — Microsoft was humiliated by the European Union's Court of First Instance on Monday when it rejected almost all elements …

Cities turning off plans for Wi-Fi — CHICAGO — Plans to blanket cities across the nation with low-cost or free wireless Internet access are being delayed or abandoned because they are proving to be too costly and complicated. — Houston, San Francisco, Chicago and other cities are putting proposed Wi-Fi networks on hold.

Gems from the archive of the New York Times — Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read and link to, let's take a look at some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing.

Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach — Summary: The original vision of the semantic web as a layer on top of the current web, annotated in a way that computers can "understand," is certainly grandiose and intriguing. Yet, for the past decade it has been a kind of academic exercise rather than a practical technology.

Xobni: Turn Outlook Into A Social Network — Xobni is one of the cool startups to come out of the TechCrunch 40 conference, and after installing their software, I've come off pretty impressed. Xobni produces a free Outlook add-in (Xobni is inbox backwards) that appears as a sidebar while reading emails in Outlook.

Zillow Gets Mo Money — Earlier this week we were joking about Fundinistas or companies that the ones who raise venture capital relentlessly. One of them happened to be Zillow, which had raised $57 million. Well, today they called to let us know that they had raised another $30 million, bringing the total to $87 million.